Excellent game, I remember that one! In fact, I might go play it right now.
Ah, yes, otherwise known as Hot Lava. A personal favorite.
Ah, yes. I quoted the wrong person. You people are keeping me up, I’m going to bed.
Pat
Another one I remember was “Alligator.” Someone–generally the youngest kid–would crawl on the floor pretending to be the alligator, while the rest of us perched on the furniture and jumped from one piece of furniture to another. I’m surprised either we or the furniture survived.
Then there was “Let’s Go Shopping,” which involved going to the local department store and typing dirty stuff on the display typewriter, fighting each other with display light sabers and Darth Vader masks, and gulping down candy we found rolling loose on the shelves. But even more fun on a Saturday afternoon was going to the pet store and turning the kittens loose. I don’t know why the local shopping center didn’t ban us.
My younger brother and I also played this, and we also played “boat.” Basically, are bunk beds were a boat, and we had to like, not drown.
We played a lot of mixed street hockey - usually with tennis balls, improvised sticks and every kid in the neighbourhood. Tag was big as was dolls and school among the girls. We also played flip with hockey cards.
Something I never see anymore is Sevens. All you need is a wall and a small ball. The object of the game is to throw the ball agaist it and catch it in a series of increasingly harder moves. You catch fewer times as the difficulty increases. Like so -
Straight toss against the wall, bounce and catch X7
Toss, let it bounce off the wall then the ground ground X6
Toss, bounce off wall, ground, clap once then catch X5
And so on. You took turns on each one and if you messed up, you had to repeat that round on your next turn. A game could take hours.
Man, this brings me back. Sometimes I wonder how I never managed to break a bone. I have some gnarly scars though. My favorite games were of the video variety, and still are, but I did plenty of other crap too.
Bike Tag was my favorite insane activity for a while. A bunch of us got our BMX bikes on the schoolyard, and one or more kids got tennis balls, depending on how many people were playing. The ball wielders were It, and had to tag people by hitting them with the ball. Then everyone rode around madly, trying not to get tagged or run into each other. The only rule was you couldn’t tag back the person who just tagged you, or someone who was fully stopped and off their bike. This usually happened if someone’s chain came off, their shoe came untied, or they did a faceplant on the pavement. One time someone tried to play on a 10-speed, but it didn’t work out so well. The 10-speed was much faster, but also much less manuverable and slower to accelerate. If someone else was It and trying to tag the 10-speeder, all the 10-speeder had to do was take off to the other end of the yard. If the 10-speeder was It, the rest of us could literally ride circles around him as he tried to get a bead on us.
When I was in high school, one summer night I was hanging around bored with my friend, so we decided to go play bike tag in a nearby office parking lot. We didn’t have tennis balls, but we did have modern mountain bikes which combined the best attributes of the old, junky BMX and 10-speed bikes. We decided that we would have to actually touch the other person to tag him. While zipping around madly on mountain bikes in between buildings. Did I mention it was nighttime? The game was largely inconclusive, but I did manage to pull off a sneaky ninja manuver of hiding in a shadow and slipping behind my friend to move in for a tag. It’s very difficult to hide a person and a bike in a shadow with no actual cover.
Another bike game we used to play was the skid contest. You got going as fast as you could, then slammed the brakes, put one foot on the ground, and turned hard. Whoever left the most impressive skid mark was the winner. I usually did pretty well at that.
Of course, there were the ever popular “jumping over and off of stuff on your bike” contests. You could do a wheelie off a curb, use a driveway to catch some air, set up a flimsy ramp with bricks and plywood, or find random junk to abuse at the park.
One time someone came up with a shoe kicking contest. You unlaced one shoe and kicked at the air with that foot, the idea being to launch your shoe high in the air. That went on for a few days, until I won spectacularly. Unfortunately for me, my shoe went way up and over a very tall fence and landed in someone’s yard right next to the schoolyard. Someone got it back for me, but we decided that game was dumb. Unlike, say, Bike Tag.
My sister and I played orphans all the time. We were orphans named Scott and Kaitlyn (she was Scott) and we’d do stuff like make “food” out of grass and milkweed pods in an old margarine tub.
On the schoolyard, we used to play horses, Indians, cowgirls, unicorns… all of which were just sort of odd versions of “house” with more running and less dress-up.
School was always popular. Why we loved playing school so much when we all hated actual school is beyond me.
Nursery/vet/baby hospital was fun too… I’d clean my room and line the walls with tupperware shoeboxes, which i’d line with towels, blankets, or old clothes, and use as beds for my stuffed animals or baby dolls. I’d set up a table as the exam table and examine the babies or animals and then pronounce them incurable and their “parents” or “owners” would wail and sob and then cry, “oh no! she’s dead!” We watched too much Rescue 911 and ER and such when I was little. We quit playing this game when my baby sister ACTUALLY called 911.
When we were REALLY little, we used to play “flubber shoes” with my dad. He’d grab our hands and we’d jump and he’d lift us by our arms so that we’d jump really really high.
good times.
My father claims that when he was a kid, his friends would play a game where one of them would get inside a cardboard box, and the other kids would stab the box with knives. The person inside had to stay still right in the middle and avoid the knives coming through.
I swear to God I’m not making this up, and I trust that my dad wasn’t either.
I’m not going to confess half the games I played as a kid, because they’re too weird.
One of the least weird was (please don’t laugh TOO loud) “Magic Sea Kittens” wherein me and my friends were all ‘Magic Sea Kittens’, which were mermaid cat things, devised because I liked cats and my friend liked mermaids. Basically, it consisted of running around the yard/neighborhood and inventing adventures for ourselves.
I had a game that I played with myself that I never really named, but I’d pretend that my back gate was a portal to another world (really the field next to my house), and I’d go out there in the mornings before school and have adventures. That was even weirder than “Magical Sea Kittens” because there was no one else around to make me more normal.
Oh, and there was “Teenagers With Psychic Powers Escape From The Lab Where Evil Scientists Are Performing Expiraments On Them And Run Around In The Sewers Being Chased By Monsters” and “Help, Our Boat Is Being Assaulted By Angry Land Masses” (we’d stand on whatever deck or porch happened to be handy with sticks and fend off rocks and things that our boat was going to crash into).
I had one friend who kept wanting to play “house” with me. I considered her to be pretty boring, although I’d sometimes concede, but only IF I got to be a Transformer. She was usually married to the President. She and I were about the same height, so either I was the world’s smallest Transformer, or else she was a First Lady of gargantuan proportions.
Good times.
Smear the Queer or Kill the Carrier: Basically you give one guy the football and everybody tries to tackle him. Yes, I understand the inappropriate nature of calling a game Smear the Queer but I didn’t really understand it when I was younger.
Dodgeball: When you got somone on the other team out they came over to your side and stayed in “prison” behind you. It was possible for them to get the ball and beam you which would earn them freedom. Great variation of the game that prevented people from just sitting out for a long time.
Hot Lava: Yes, I think everyone pretended the floor was lava at some point.
Pretend: We battled the Decepticons, Cobra, and of course the galactic Empire led by Darth Vader. I’m sure everyone played some form of pretend.
Wall Ball: Throw a tennis ball against the wall and try to catch it. If it touches your body and you don’t catch it you must immediately run and touch the wall while the other players grab the ball and beam you in the ass as hard as possible.
Hmmm, come to think of it most of the games I played as a kid involved violence of some kind. Even if it as just pretend violence.
Marc
We were lame, too. We played “school” and “office”. A lot. My sister’s friend asked for, and received, a “real” file cabinet for Christmas. You’d have thought she died and went to heaven.
No one else ever played doctor? That was always a fun game.
I used to pretend I was a mounted police woman, on my bike. My ‘horse’ was a bay Morgan named Mickey, and I would monitor all the other neighborhood kids ‘traffic’ on their bikes & scooters, pass out traffic tickets, and chase down thieves.
I played Barbies a lot, only not the girly version. No, MY Barbies owned stables and kennels, I had TONS of little plastic dogs for her, and the Best of the West Thunderbolt horses in almost every color they came in. They were much more in scale to Barbie than the ones that came with her.
More often, I just left Barbie out of the mix entirely and just played with the model horses. 
I liked to play restaurant, too, I would actually make food from Play Doh, write up menus, and serve pretend customers. (I was a lonely child)
I played lava in the back yard a lot, staying on the swing set to avoid being burned.
I had a favorite springy-rocking horse, a black & white Pinto named Blaze. Whenever there was a horse race on TV, I would drag him out into the living room and pretend I was riding in the race. We always won.
When I was just a young thing, I got a job at one of those Big Box Superstores. It hadn’t opened yet, and we cashiers were supposed to peruse the store and learn where things were kept so we could tell customers when they asked. Naturally, we younguns used this time for horsing around.
We had a hell of a good time Cart Surfing in the long, wide aisles. I wasn’t a very good driver, or the cart I had chosen must have been flawed, because I crashed into a huge display of paper towels. I looked up from the floor where I was lying, covered in rolls of paper towels, and saw three dudes in suits looking down at me. “Oh shit,” I thought. “Three days on the job and I’m already gonna get fired.”
But instead, one of the men, an older gentleman said, “Pardon me,” and took the cart. With a look of concentration, he ran down the aisle, and hopped on board, his tie gaily streaming behind him as he zoomed away.
No one ever said a word to me about it. I cleaned up the mess and, well, that was the end of my Cart Surfing days.
You guys were creative. We mostly just played house. I was always the dirtbag father. Father because I was the tallest and nobody else wanted to be the dad. Dirtbag because I’d get bored somewhere between mum getting pregnant and giving birth and wander off. We never managed to get far past giving birth anyway because the bell would ring and we’d have to start over the next day.
Oh, and mercy. Two people hold hands and then try to hurt each other as much as possible until someone cries “Mercy!” It got banned by the teachers, stupid spoilsports. I was good at that game because I had veeery flexible wrists.
Another game that got banned by teachers was “Let’s pull each other’s pants down”. For some reason, in year 4 it was the cool thing in school to dak each other. They had to put a notice in the newsletter about it and everything. I remember one girl pulling down another’s pants… but ha ha! She was wearing bloomers over her underpants! So the other girl pulled down her bloomers too. :smack:
We played Manhunt almost every night in the Summer. It was huge, all the kids in the neighborhood would play. The hiding/hunting area covered 4 blocks.
Also, Marco Polo in the pool or the river.
Oh, the good old days.
I played lots of organized stuff: baseball, bowling, etc. But some of the most fun things were the unorganized organized stuff.
Kill the guy with the ball - one guy has the ball, the others try to mob him. Great fun if you tossed the ball to the guy heading the charge.
Hide and Seek - the only rule was that you couldn’t go into a building. Nothing said about going onto a building. I used to crawl up on top of my neighbor’s garage and watch everyone go crazy looking for me. When they finally found out, the rule got changed.
Water balloon fights. What can I say?
This is a game I’ve seen in movies and tv…How do you play? All I ever see is kids saying Marco… Polo…
I dont get it 
The person who is “it” has their eyes closed and must find the others. To do this he yells out “Marco” to which the others answer “Polo”. He must locate them by going toward the answering voices.